PS Vita hack can’t be used to pirate games, creator ‘100% against piracy’

PS Vita was recently hacked to allow for homebrew development and play, but CVG reports the hack cannot be used to pirate games.

Engineered by Yifan Lu, the hack is part of Lu’s Usermode Vita Loader project, which will make it possible for anyone to create and play homebrew games on PS Vita.

Lu took to Twitter and explained on Twitter that his loader could not be use to play pirate PS Vita games, stating that it is “physically impossible to decrypt or load retail games with my exploit”.

However, in an interview with PlayStation Lifestyle, Lu did acknowledge that the loader could be used as a backdoor to piracy, “When the exploit goes public, it could be used as a stepping stone to analyze the system for farther exploits, including the more desirable kernel exploit, which if found would open the system up entirely (mods, CFW, maybe even Linux/Android, and unfortunately ISO loaders).”

“However, it takes a lot of skills to find such an exploit,” Lu added, “and those who I talked to with the necessary skills are all anti-piracy. However, not thinking of potential other exploits, this one can only be used to load homebrews and nothing else…Sony’s system is really well designed and I believe a kernel exploit is very far away.”

Lu was keen to stress that he was “100% against piracy and no tool I will make will benefit piracy. This tool, in fact, cannot be used for loading backups/pirated content even if I want to because of the physical limitations of the exploit (it is userland, no rights to decrypt/load games).”